You had to expect this: "Jim's 2 cents on the iPhone"

Well I may be late to the party, but eventually I get around to it.  More than one person has asked me what I think of the new Apple iPhone and as is my pattern, have answered with my usual candour and pragmatism.  It seemed however I was repeating myself a lot, so felt compelled to put to print what my thoughts on this matter are.  I may flatter myself but I like to think people are curious about my opinion on this product because of my expertise in mobile technologies and in particular mobile rich media.  Or maybe they're just trying to make conversation to the guy seated next to them on the bus :).

No doubt we all felt the ograsmic cries emanating from Silicon Valley as Steve Jobs announced to a lathered up  audience the next revolution in mobile technologies.  I've never been one to spontaneously erupt in a gushy frenzy of adulation and of course this announcement and subsequent details haven't changed my response patterns.

I've always felt that Apple was absolutely superb at two things: namely marketing and industrial design.  I'm not a Mac bigot, but with no real evidence, I'll even surrender that they do a terrific job on usability of software.  So when it comes to the iPhone, Apple has once again hit the mark on at least two of these strengths.  The market seemed primed with anticipation and excitement at the much-rumoured iPhone.   Jobs' smoothly honed rhetoric simple provided the climax to a long extended period of coy foreplay.  Definitely a marketing coup.

As for industrial design, again, they've hit one out of the park.  In reality however we had to expect this.  There is absolutely no conceivable way Apple could penetrate the mobile phone market if they simply came out with yet another flip-phone or a slickly packaged bend/twist qwerty keypad device.  God knows there are enough of them out there.  The iPhone's iconic look clearly sets it apart from the competition.

After discovering some further details, I realize they've come out with some clever engineering features as well.  One of them is the inertial accelerometer feature of the device.  This seems to be largely used for automatically changing from portrait to landscape mode as the device senses the orientation of the device.  This is a feature I tried for a period of time about 5 years ago to introduce to Nokia's N-Gage devices when I was chief architect at the product creation centre for Nokia here in Vancouve.  Clearly I lost that battle :).

The other extremely cool feature is the use of multi-touch.  I first saw a demonstration of this multi-touch technology thru a web video I think David Vogt sent me a couple years ago.  In the demo, an artist was using his multiple fingers on a large horizontal display screen to do wonderful things with new gestures such as "stretching" and "squeezing".  I saw then what a wonderful new paradigm this could be.  I'm really happy that Apple has moved this out of the labs and into a real product.

But I've got to say, that's about it for my personal level of excitement over the iPhone.

In terms of raw technology, I'm afraid there's not a whole lot new here.  Lots of other phones have as much permanent storage as the iPhone, a number have WiFi, some have builtin media management capabilities.  In fact in terms of raw functionality, the iPhone is pretty much middle of the road for a smart phone.  And in particular it still faces all the problems that other devices have to deal with.  To mention just a few:

1.  Slow data transfer speeds.  Browsing over EDGE networks is not for the faint of heart.  A certain masochistic tendency is definitely a plus for this feat.  WiFi certainly bypasses that problem but at the price of power and geographic constraint.

2.  Fundamentally addressing the constraints of a small device for issues such as user input, meaningful content display, power consumption, and performance.

3.   Dancing around operator requirements and integrating into carrier business models in a manner that does not totally disenfranchise the consumer.

4.  Convincing users that they need to spend $800 for a telephone.

5.  Interoperability with poorly implemented or poorly defined standard services such as WAP or MMS.

On these and other points, Apple faces as significant a challenge as any other mobile phone vendor and the iPhone offers no magic bullets.

And of even more concern to me as a developer, like all Apple products, the iPhone is a closed platform.  It does not support J2ME and there is no SDK available for the product.  Jobs dismisses such concerns with the same tired old statements we've heard for at least 8 years now about security of wireless networks and not opening this precious resource to just any old developer!

So in the end, I see the iPhone as yet another mobile device - falling squarely in the smart phone category.  It finds itself awkwardly positioned being priced as a business device, yet promoted as a consumer device.  But here's what I think is the really, really good news about the iPhone.

I personally - along with a goodly number of other people have been trying desperately to convince the world that the mobile phone is so much more than just a voice/text device.  In spite of that, uptake of real data services and in particular rich-media services have been paltry at best.  What iPhone has the potential to do is wake up the masses to the power of mobile content.  Somehow Steve Jobs convinced all of us we need our music on the road.  Maybe now he can convince us all we need rich content on the road as well.

And that would be good for us all.